Alto ace Bruce Williams is tonight’s guest, and the legendary Louis Armstrong is next week’s topic, when the Talkin’ Jazz series returns to the Count Basie’s Carlton Lounge beginning tonight.
By TOM CHESEK
April is National Jazz Appreciation Month (it’s also National Garden Month, National Poetry Month, and National Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month, but those are stories for another time) — a fact made manifest here in the Basie-birthing borough by the Navesink.
Every April for the past four years, Red BankÂ’s globe-trotting jazz scholar, conductor, arranger and producer Joe Muccioli has teamed with his fellow founders of the Jazz Arts Project to host a quietly swingin’ soiree by the name of TalkinÂ’ Jazz, a weekly Monday night series of intimate gatherings that serve to illuminate the human element, the sweet science and even the silly stuff behind what the Man Called Mooch has branded “America’s classical music.”
Presented inside the Carlton Lounge (that’s the cool and comfortable VIP room on the ground floor of the Count Basie Theatre), it’s a happening that’s blessedly free of tuxedo’d pretension, free of nightclub noise — and free of charge. While you’re under no obligation to knock on the door and tell ’em “Joe sent me,” you can do so if you’re feeling frisky and fancy free. And, best of all, you can head on over there this very evening, if you’re feeling jazzily spontaneous.
The series continues at the Count Basie’s Carlton Lounge with visits by musician-historian Bill Crow (April 18), plus WBGO radio’s Dorthaan Kirk and Sheila Anderson (April 25).
The 2011 series sets sail tonight at 7p, with a visit by Bruce Williams, a young veteran of such formidable organizations as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra and the World Saxophone Quartet — and as the Jazz Arts Project’s own education director, a man who plays a major role in the mentoring and development of students in the recently created Jazz Arts Academy. The alto saxophonist hosts a discussion on Improvisation and Education — a couple of concepts that, in the hands of this music master, are not mutually exclusive.
